A serie on places were famous artists or writers lived

Alain Fournier, for ever a teenager in the Sologne of the “Grand Meaulnes”.

“Everything I tell is happening somewhere, “he said. This “somewhere”, villages of childhood or area of love, where this writer, died at the age of 28 in the first days of the war of 14, felt banned, is the Sologne. The villages: La Chapelle-d’Angillon where he was born and he left at age 5, Epineuil, where his parents were appointed teachers and from where he left for Paris at 12 years. The “long red house, with five glass doors, at the end of the village” is still there as well as the well where grandfather was washing, Henri’s little iron bed (that was his real name), the classroom where from his desk on the platform, “impregnable citadel”, his father taught the Republican knowledge to “the army lined up on the benches”.”All that,” writes Alain Fournier, “you see, for me, it’s the whole world, and it seems to me that my heart is made of the whole”. During a stay in England, he noted that the large, quiet houses in London look like “Sologne castles touching each other”. The castle of Cornançay did inspire the “mysterious Domaine” of Yvonne de Galais in “The great Meaulnes”. “Woman,” he said, “was for me only landscapes, the reminder of hours, of country and landscapes.” Of Sologne, this space and time forever made responsive to his heart, he told one day to a friend: “It is more terrible and more decisive than to show you a lover.”